The exhibition stems from Eric Shanes’ researches into the group of 390 watercolours in the Bequest known collectively as “Colour Beginnings”: a collection of sketches, some of which have been identified as studies for finished works and others which seem like abstract fields of washed colour. The current exhibition “Turner’s Watercolour Explorations 1810-1842″, tucked away in two dimly lit rooms on the Clore Gallery’s third floor, is a delightful exception, constantly surprising and frequently fascinating It is a triumph of good museum keeping. This is pretty standard procedure: a great national collection being regularly and variously used, but one doesn’t expect many surprises. They are mostly housed in the Clore Gallery at the Tate; a permanent collection rotated on the walls, others available for study, and every so often an additional selection pulled out to explore some theme or other that has occurred to whichever Turner scholar is currently in favour.

The Turner Bequest, which has been national property since the artist’s death in 1851, amounts to some 300 finished paintings and a staggering 19,300 watercolours and drawings. It’s in its deft, low-key comedy rather than in its more earnestly portentous moments that The Wolves shows marked promise.To 29 March Bride Lane, Fleet St, London EC4 (0171-936 3456)Paul Taylor. And given that he can’t understand a word they’re saying, characters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time confiding their deepest feelings to him. In this case, played by Crispin Redman, he’s the sole survivor of a plane crash; is this figure really Flinders, an LSE professor, star prophet of the free market and intellectual pin-up of Nicholas Blane’s Tchitiri, a West-worshipping former mayor who comes out of hiding to meet his hero?Because the survivor remains obscure to the point of being a cipher, there’s little narrative drive and you can’t work up much interest in the relationship he keeps almost developing with Odyn’s daughter. We are not, and never will be, the writers of history, we are the written on.” But where Pentecost devised – in the competitions sparked by the discovery of a possibly landmark 12th-century fresco – a superb vantage point from which to explore this theme of national identity and the ideological disarray left by communism’s collapse, The Wolves fails to find an equivalently fruitful focus.As in The Government Inspector, we are shown the effects on a community when wrong assumptions are made about a newly arrived stranger.

For an oppressed pig farmer, it’s a further little irony that his live-in, dourly disgruntled, intellectual daughter Anya (Jane Hazlegrove) has established a vegetarian regime.”History crashes through here every 50 years or so,” declares the desperate Odyn, as he hits the vodka bottle “and we are left clinging to the wreckage. His son, meanwhile, accidentally started the recent revolution with a student jape and died an equally inadvertent martyr’s death when the bronze statue of the dictator to which he was clinging collapsed through faulty installation. We learn that Sylvester Morand’s Odyn, a hard-pressed pig farmer, destroyed his chances of freedom in the old dispensation on the still talked-about occasion when he denied the dictator’s football team their statutory victory by a spectacular 89th-minute save. The cock-up theory of history is, for example, amply illustrated by the central family.